On 5/25/07, *Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo* <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br
<mailto:lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br>> wrote:
Aren't these features covered in the "about" page?
My 2 cents:
Technically, all relevant informations are on the site indeed.
However, I'm not sure it's very efficient at grabbing the attention of
a person scanning the web for a solution to his problem, even if Lua
actually *is* that solution.
It sucks to make a blattantly comparative page such as "Lua is better
than $FOOBARLANGUAGE because such and that etc.". However, most people
potentially interested by Lua already know of Python, Ruby, Javascript
and maybe another couple of other languages which look like safe bets.
Their real question is "What does Lua provide, which is not provided
by these safe bets?". So even if you can't be too blattant, you must
keep in mind that it *is* the question you must actually answer.
Therefore I'd advocate a reordering of about.html which highlights the
differenciating factors, and maybe moving/copying parts of it to the
front page. All languages brag about being efficient, supporting
advanced features etc. IMO, the decreasing order of importance, to be
reflected in the paragraphs ordering, should be:
- portability and symbiosis with C/C++.
- clean, orthogonal semantics. Some hint should be somehow provided
that you're doing *way* better than anything else save Scheme with
this respect, without seaming too pretentious...
- there is a useful subset of the language accessible to
non-programmers: that can make your applications' power users very happy.
- there has been serious apps written with it. This shouldn't come
first, I only care about this if I'm already attracted to the
language. Heck, COBOL probably has a bigger code base than Lua: lack
of significant apps is a show-stopper, but existence of some is a weak
argument.
- speed and licencing also are about relieving show stopper issues,
they shouldn't come first.
Another nitpicking: most of the time, when I click on an "About"
button on my computer, I get a boring credits nag screen and some
copyright info. My Pavlovian reflex is to expect whatever is behind
"about" to have a signal/noise ratio close to zero. Maybe a more
obvious name, such as "Lua in a nutshell", would help driving people
to that page? Also, the links are very dark and without underlines, it
takes a real effort to notice them. It especially matters for that
page, which is addressed to first-time visitors who're likely to have
a dozen other tabs open, pointing to groovy, rebol, io, forth, guile,
etc. and are likely to eliminate anything which won't grab their short
attention span within the first minute.
I've been first interested by Lua because of its ability to run on
tiny embedded devices (which I learned about through word of mouth,
not through the web, incidentally). Then I had an occasion to discover
its other, much more lovey and impressive features, because I was
already hooked; but I would never had guessed how great a language it
was by just looking at lua.org <http://lua.org>. Couldn't PUC hire
some marketing intern? :D
